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OS X Leopard on a Samsung NC10 Netbook

And now, something I’ve wanted to try for about two weeks now: installing Mac
OS X Leopard on the Samsung NC10 Netbook. I followed a guide from
Wired to try and
get me through the process. On the “things you need” list, we have:

Use the OSX86Tools application to set up the USB drive: click Install EFI/Run
FDISK, and then choose “Run Script”. Enter your password in the terminal
window that appears, then choose 4 to run Chameleon EFI. You’ll have to select
which disk and partition you want it installed on. This is the part I had a
little issue with - I had to use the exact version that Wired provides (don’t
update if it prompts you to).

Eject the drive from your Mac, connect it to the NC10. Boot from the drive,
and go through the fairly mundane install process (hint: it’s just like every
other install of OS X, pretty much). Reboot, and you have a copy of Leopard
running on non-Apple hardware.

This is another place where I had a problem. Because I’ve got Ubuntu installed
on the same machine, I’m using Grub
to choose which partition to boot to. In Ubuntu, you can cd /boot/grub/ and
edit the file called menu.lst. Copy the layout of one of the existing ones
(down the bottom), replacing the location of that partition with the location
of your OS X partition.

And there you have it. A lot works out the box, including Bluetooth; not
included is support for USB and Airport, but that may be forthcoming. One
thing I was concerned about was that the USB ports might not work in Windows
after installing Leopard either (the Wired article is ambiguous) but they do.
This video’s a little crummy, but I needed something to make this post
interesting (and distract me from the fact that I’ve been in my room revising
for a few days):

I’ve been on a MacBook for a couple of years now, but OS X is just so much nicer
than Windows. I couldn’t handle XP on the NC10 (more than anything, it was
actually pretty dull). As for Ubuntu - while nice, I’m not up to learning
another OS inside out right now.

I’m afraid I could never get Wi-Fi working properly, so I had to uninstall it -
you could give it a go with an up-to-date copy of OSX86 though, there might have
been some progress since I first wrote this.

I would really love an update for this post. I have a NC10 and I’m starting to
get unhappy with XP and this might be worth trying ;) But since I’m new to this,
I would love an expert to try it first :P

By tom on 03 February 2010 at 19:23:

unless i missed it, how big of a memory stick will i need, as the iso file is
6gb, just thinking will an 8gb be enough